The clue which I ignored and paid dearly for was the fact that many posters on this board were sucked into Mike's sincerity/wonderfulness (sorry, at a loss for words at this point) because he was so accessible and took their calls!
And this is a bad thing? Mike being open to all calls is great IMO. I certainly believe Eco management was not aware of missing 1.20 by as much as they did until the days leading up to the announcement (this comes from evidence from C&L, and management themselves among other sources).
Granted: Mike's streak isn't there. He had 3 straight years instead of 4 of meeting his numbers (of 50%+ growth I might add in EPS and Revenues). But has he lost "all credibility?" What if Eco took steps to insure that what happened for fiscal '97 never happens again? Would that restore any faith in management for you? And another question: do you not consider the fact that this was our first audit from a Big 4 firm? Or that Eco is one of the few foreign companies that has chosen voluntarily to file electronically, to get a Big 4 auditing firm, or the hundreds of other things they've done to try and please shareholders and the investment community?
Many of us should have learned a lesson: that despite all of the hype on boards like this about how "undervalued" a stock is and how it gets no respect ....
LOL!!!
This is a joke....right? "Hype on the boards." Do you consider information about a company that does not bear fruit in the short term to be hype!?
Hype, in its simplest form, is advertising for a company, more or less pleading with the people who read the boards to buy the stock based on no evidence or information whatsoever. It has comments like "this is the next Microsoft" or "the CEO is Bill Gates's envy." Or whatever. Full of opinions and not facts. You get the point. It tries to entice the reader to buy the stock for no concrete reason.
However, if a post gives information, evidence and what have you (whether it is technical or fundamental) and then based on that evidence makes a decision, that post is in no way, shape, or form is "hype." This board has never been a board of "hype." It's one of the better ones, IMO. If you want hype, you can check out boards like TAVA or IOM. Where some posts are one liners begging you to buy the stock.
But one thing is for sure: this board is not that. And having said that, I can say while all the information and decision processes performed on this board by such loyal posters as Prof and the others may not have proven to be correct in the short term , it's irrelevant in the long term. That is, just because Eco isn't 15 right now doesn't mean the bulls were wrong. The stock is still undervalued and a great long term holding. It didn't lose that status when it began paying taxes and 50% growth looked more like 37%. It's still far and beyond above the p/e which is also far and beyond below the industry average (try saying that 10 times fast).
We didn't say that all "bearish" people on Eco were "stupid." We just didn't agree with them on Eco's intrinsic value. And while the bears were right for the short term, I suspect that as the last 3 years have proven (see Rookie's Post dated on December 31st), Eco's stock will continue to post gains in excess of the market averages and perhaps as high as it's own average (50%) for the following 12 months.
Posts like these tickle me as we were hearing the same thing when Eco was 6.75$ last year this time. And today it's close to nine. 33% aint bad. And that's not even the optimal return..........
Conservatively Yours,
Raymond J. Norris |
